China Glaze Summer Neons Nail Art: Starfish Manicure (+ Tutorial)

Hello everyone! Today I have another post of nail art for you using the China Glaze Summer Neons. I've got some pictures here to show you and then at the end, I made a Photoshop graphic tutorial illustrating how to achieve this look.

The nails for toady are... STARFISH! I was thinking about this China Glaze collection and how all of the names are beach or ocean themed, and I decided that I wanted to do something that fit in with the spirit of the polish. Starfish popped into my head and the rest is history!

I started with a base of China Glaze Sun-Kissed, a neon yellow shimmer. I used three coats for this manicure but could have probably gotten away with two.

The starfish bodies are done in China Glaze Love's a Beach, which is actually a neon pink shimmer, despite looking kind of coral colored in this manicure. I think layering it on top of the yellow altered the color a bit or something. Anyway, it's definitely a hot pink when worn on its own.

The dots on the starfish bodies are China Glaze Splish Splash, a medium blue shimmer. This is the same color that I used for the frame in my first framed manicure.

All of the colors were easy to work with for nail art. They all dried fairly quickly, as they are neons. While that can make nail art a tiny bit more difficult, it wasn't totally unworkable and it's a great quality in a well-rounded polish.

Aren't the little starfish just darling? I was actually surprised by how much I liked this manicure, as I was kind of making it up as I was doing it. The blue dots are important to the starfish, because otherwise they kind of looked like paint splatters, haha.

On to the tutorial...

1. Start with a base color. For this exact look, use China Glaze Sun-Kissed.
2. Using a small nail art striper brush, make five thin lines in the places where you want the arms of the starfish to be. For this exact look, use China Glaze Love's a Beach.
3. Connect the outer points of the arms with wide, draping lines.
4. Fill in the body of the starfish with the same color. 
5. Add small dots in a contrasting color to represent the starfishes’ bumpy skin. I used the same small striper brush for this part, in order to help make the dots extra small. For this exact look, use China Glaze Splish Splash.
6. Once the design is totally dry, topcoat it! 

Pretty easy huh? 

I'd love to see if you attempt this manicure. In fact, I just started a board on the Chalkboard Nails Pinterest for pinning other people's recreations of manicures from my site! So make sure to comment here or email me with a link to your post. No blog? Send me an email with the picture and I will upload the pin manually!

The products in this post were sent to me by the manufacturer or their PR.

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blue, china glaze, favorite, freehand, nail art, neons, pink, shimmer, tutorial, yellow